


Low

by iamsquashie



Category: Linkin Park
Genre: Addiction, Angst, Braz, Depression, Fluff, M/M, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-14
Updated: 2018-01-14
Packaged: 2019-03-04 21:22:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 12,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13373304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iamsquashie/pseuds/iamsquashie
Summary: Snapshots of a relationship, spanning two decades and seven studio albums. A mixture of angst and fluff, in varying degrees of slashiness.[B/C aka BRAZ] *COMPLETE*





	1. Hybrid Theory // High

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted to LPfiction.com, between 21 October and 7 November 2017.

You were thin, too thin, the angles of you arms and legs awkward by default and your ribs announcing themselves whenever you took off your shirt in the glaring stagelights, which you always did.

You had dark rings under your eyes, in contrast with your bone-pale skin, and the wild and living darkness within the eyes themselves was in contrast with the air of impending death, or undeath, that lingered around you.

You had dreadlocks, messy and heavy, and you tossed them and whipped them and sang with a ferocity that seemed to be burning up your body’s last reserves.

They took you into the fold because of your voice. That’s what they were looking for, and they found it. Your band had disbanded and your voice was up for grabs. You were just the package that the voice came inside, and they had to take you too, even though they didn’t know you, didn’t understand you, didn’t really see you. Not at first.

You discarded the dreads and the pleather pants. You slipped your emaciated body into clothes five times too big for you, like they were doing. You dyed your hair. You pierced your lip. You got more tattoos. You wore spikes. You painted your nails. You needed to keep the edge even if you weren’t presenting it in the way you used to. To do away with it altogether would be dishonest.

They were clean, these boys. Their brand of cool was polished and wholesome. They’d grown up pure of heart and soul and had never seen the filth you’d seen, had never been low. You noticed when your words made their skins crawl, made their eyes meet uncomfortably for a fraction of a second while you spoke, made them tilt themselves away from you.

Straight boys. Straight and narrow. You freaked them out.

You worked on changing the way you moved your body, the rhythm of it, your reactions to the music. This music was different, and that helped. You jumped, you thrashed, you threw yourself around the stage, but you took the sex out of it. That didn’t work anymore. They wouldn’t like that.

For them, sex was something that happened between them and their perfect girlfriends, something that would occasionally be wheeled out for a dirty joke, but just as quickly packed away, back into its box. For you, sex was heaven and hell, the light and the darkness. It had shaped you, broken you, redeemed you. It wasn’t separate from everything else in the way that it was for them.

They were unambiguous, but you were not.

You were still emaciated, your features too big for your face, and it was mentioned in articles — _the preposterously skinny lead vocalist with the glasses and the tattoos_ — turning you into a caricature of yourself, but no-one ever commented on the fact that one of them was actually skinnier than you were. He hid it better, under two shirts and behind his guitar, he distracted everyone with his various beards and his headphones. But even if he hadn’t, nobody would’ve worried about him, because he was the purest of them all.

Squeaky-clean middle-class Jewish boy with an academic record worthy of framing, he was one of the two masterminds of the band. He’d been responsible for getting you signed, he’d had a hand in the writing of every song. He didn’t stand up front, but he managed things from the back. You might’ve been in the foreground of every band photo, but he was in charge of you, and sometimes you resented that.

You see him in the bathroom on the bus one day when he thinks everyone has disembarked. He’s standing in front of the mirror without his shirt on, putting bandages around his delicate, bony wrist. He sees you, and he turns.

“What do you want?”

You’re startled by his immediate aggression, but you keep your cool, roll your eyes, mumble that he should consider fucking himself, and then you say, “Hurt your wrist?”, because you care, in spite of everything.

“Yes, I’m the guitarist,” he says, his voice hard and bitter, as though you couldn’t possibly understand his pain. All you ever have to do is prance around on the stage with a mic. That’s what he thinks. Your instrument is built into you. You have it easy. You consider describing to him how it feels to scream your way through an entire set, but you don’t.

He's one of the people who bark instructions to you while you stand in the vocal booth.

_“Scream it. Scream it longer. Can you scream it louder? Scream it again.”_

He doesn’t fucking get it.

“Whatever,” you say.

The show goes well. Afterwards, the atmosphere is celebratory. Your success is still heady and new. You’re still pinching yourselves on a daily basis.

They want to go out for a fancy meal somewhere but you decline, and you notice that none of them seem particularly disappointed by this. You aren’t one of them. They don’t need you in order to have a good time. In fact, their good times are more secure without you there. You have the tendency to fuck things up. You drink too much. You’re volatile. You put them on edge.

And so you hang out alone in the studio in the back of the bus and you light up a joint even though you know you’ll get shat on if anyone smells it later.

You’re two Jack and Cokes deep and the weed has rubbed the sharp edges off everything when you hear someone boarding the bus. You only just have the wherewithal to think “shit”, before you’re busted.

It’s him. He stands in the doorway, glaring at you, his skinny legs protruding from a pair of cut-off jeans.

“Why didn’t you come with us?” he says.

You shrug. “Why are you back so early?”

He shrugs. “Why are you smoking in the studio? Mike’s going to fucking kill you.”

“Mike?” you say. “What about you?”

“I won’t kill you if you share,” he says.

You try not to act surprised as you hold out the smouldering joint, and he tries not to seem inexperienced as he takes a puff of it, but you see him trying not to cough, and eventually he does, covering his mouth with his pale, bony hand. Normally you would laugh, and that’s what he’s expecting you to do; his face has gone red.

But you don’t laugh.

“Try a smaller hit,” you say. “Go slower. Keep it in your mouth for a while.”

He tries again, successfully this time, and then slumps back into the couch beside you. You don’t speak, you simply pass the joint back and forth, him coughing intermittently, but soldiering on until it’s all gone, and you pop the roach into your pocket.

His eyes slide closed and you think perhaps he’s falling asleep, but then he says, “I was a dick to you earlier. I’m sorry.”

“S’cool,” you say. “Whatever.”

“No, it’s not cool,” he says. “None of this—” he casts his hand vaguely around the studio, “—none of it would’ve happened without you.”

The dregs of your Jack and Coke have gone warm, but you drain the glass anyway. “Want one?” you say to him, raising the empty glass.

“No,” he says, running his hand over his face. “I drank enough before I left. My head is spinning.”

“Did you eat?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

He turns to look at you then, blinking to focus his eyes on your face.

“I wasn’t hungry,” he says, balling a fist against his hollow stomach. “And I got pissed off with them before they ordered food. I figured I’d come back and hang out with you instead.”

“What did they do to piss you off?” you ask him.

“It doesn’t matter,” he says, and he looks uncomfortable. You want to know.

“Tell me,” you say.

“I said it doesn’t matter,” he replies.

You try to identify the expression on his face. You’re better at this when you’re high, and you’re confident that part of what he’s displaying is guilt. Perhaps shame.

“They were talking shit about me, weren’t they?” you say, trying your luck.

His moment of hesitation confirms your hypothesis.

“I didn’t participate,” he says. “They’re just bitter because you’re the latecomer, but also the star. You get all the credit when you’ve put years less work into the band than the rest of us have.”

“I didn’t ask for any of that.”

“I know you didn’t. It pisses me off sometimes too, but I know it’s not your fault.”

“Well, thanks,” you say. “And I’m honoured. Big Brad Brad fobbing off a good time to grace me with his presence.”

“I knew you’d be smoking weed in the bus,” he said. “Figured it was a good opportunity to try it out.”

“That was your first smoke?”

He nods lazily and a smiles. “First successful smoke, yes.”

You reach out and touch his goatee, almost without meaning to. Whatever filter normally exists between thought and action is gone. You’ve startled yourself and you pull your hand back, hoping that somehow he’s too intoxicated already to have even noticed. But he has noticed and he’s looking at you quizzically.

“Beard envy?” he says.

“Major,” you say. “Mine’s patchy as fuck.”

The next moment, you find that his hand is on your face, feeling for stubble, running along your jawline, slender fingers tickling across your cheeks and your chin. You are frozen.

“Hmm,” he says, withdrawing his hand. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t think you should grow any sort of beard anyway. Your face is nice.”

Something has tipped. Something has changed. Not with you, though. You’ve touched and been touched in many different ways by a wide variety of friends and foes, in various degrees of inebriation. You’ve had the best and the worst of it. Nothing about this situation is out of the ordinary for you, in the grand scheme of things. But as far as you’re aware, it’s very, very out of the ordinary for him, and you feel an new imbalance in the dynamic.

You have the power of experience, and he seems to realise this. His bossy, superior attitude has shrunk away. He looks as small as he actually is. There’s nothing Big or Bad about him. He’s young and green. He’s a fresh twig.

You’ve got another joint rolled and ready, and you light it up. You had planned on smoking only the one, but then Brad smoked half of it, and he was so slow and inefficient about the whole process that a fair bit of it burnt away while he was holding it between his bony, calloused fingers, trying not to cough, and failing.

You take a deep drag and offer it to him. He looks at you, uncertain.

“I want to but… my throat is burnt out,” he says. “It fucking hurts. I’m not good at smoking.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. I mean. No. OK, give it to me,” he says, putting on a brave face and taking the joint from you with comical care.

He sucks on the joint and immediately succumbs to a bout of violent coughing, his skeletal chest heaving underneath his T-shirt. You take the joint from his fingers before he drops it and burns a hole through something.

“Ugh… s… sorry,” he chokes. “Fuck, that’s annoying. I want more.”

His voice is slower and deeper than normal and his eyes are starting to look a bit glazed. He’s already pretty high from his first smoke, rubbing his hand absent-mindedly back and forth along his throat, as if that will make it feel better. He’s watching you smoke and he looks genuinely impressed, which is ridiculous and a bit embarrassing. His eyes are on your face, and you find yourself taking deeper drags than necessary, blowing the smoke out in thin streams, showing off.

_Why?_

_This is stupid. This is so fucking stupid._

_When will he stop staring?_

But he doesn’t stop staring. And your head is light, the studio looks cosy and blurry at the edges, his thin arm is flush with yours, feverishly warm, and it’s nice not to be alone.

You’ve zoned out, but you zone back in and see that he’s still staring at you, and he’s biting his lip. He’s nice looking, you admit. He tries to make himself look harder with the backwards hats and the beards, but he has a soft face, a sweet face. His dark eyes are soulful and intelligent, even when they’re glazed over.

_What is he thinking?_

He wants to be involved, but his body is letting him down. You understand this feeling, even if your experiences of physical failure are a whole lot less wholesome than having lungs too pure for smoking.

You draw in a mouthful of fragrant smoke and hold it in your cheeks and move your face slowly towards his face until the tips of your noses are almost touching and you wait to see if he’ll react.

He blinks and blinks, but doesn’t move away, so you tilt your face and touch your lips against his, and as he opens his mouth in surprise, you exhale the smoke slowly, and he takes it in.

You imagine that he’s hollow and the cooled smoke is filling him up, rushing into his chest, down his skinny arms and legs, into his fingers and toes.

He doesn’t cough.

*****


	2. Meteora // Cold

The second album is a success. You’re playing sold-out shows all around the globe. The band is becoming an unstoppable juggernaut and everything feels like a dream. You’re rich now. You’re famous. Strangers are getting your face tattooed onto their bodies. Doors are opening faster than you can even look into them to find out if you care what’s on the other side. The world is your oyster.

And yet—

You’re unhappier than you’ve been in years. Your marriage is falling apart. She’s fucking unstable. So are you. It’s her fault, but it’s your fault too. You hate yourself and you’re worried about the kid caught in the middle.

You’re drinking too much. You’re succumbing to the temptations of stronger, more dangerous things because they’re there in your face all the fucking time. Harder bands of harder dudes, singling you out on tour because they can see it in your eyes: you’re the party guy, the reckless one, the one who’s going to cut loose and fuck shit up with them. Your own band is growing sick to death of your bullshit.

You thought you were getting close to Mike when you sat down to write songs with him and you opened up. He wrote ‘Breaking the Habit’ about you, and for you, and it meant a lot to you at the time, and you cried in the recording booth, but now you just feel like every time you fuck up, you’re disappointing him even more than you would’ve if he hadn’t made any emotional investments; you’re making him so angry.

_Every step that I take is another mistake to you… Caught in the undertow, just caught in the undertow…_

Fuck off.

You can barely make eye contact with any of them, let alone Brad. You haven’t spoken to him about that evening on the bus.

It wasn’t even a proper kiss. Your lips touched his lips, but you didn’t push your tongue into his mouth. He didn’t throw his arms out and wrap them around you. He didn’t pull you on top of him. He didn’t let you tear his clothes from his lean, translucently pale body and fuck him senseless.

That was just a dream you had later, when you’d gone five days without smoking because Mike threw out your stash and crapped on you — and on Brad, but mostly on you, for trying to corrupt his best friend.

The dreams are always vivid when you stop smoking regularly.

You didn’t want to stop. You didn’t want to dream.

You have a bad show. You’re hungover and you fuck up a couple of the songs and then afterwards you try to laugh it off, which makes Mike angrier than he’s ever been. He’s yelling at you while the others are mumbling, awkwardly agreeing with him or burning you with their eyes.

The more you try to defend yourself, the worse it gets. You’re cussing, gesticulating, feeling the aggression rise inside you like bile. The stage manager tries to step in and you end up throwing someone’s coffee mug against the wall next to him and storming out of the changing room.

You don’t know where you are or where to go, but you just keep walking, avoiding the sounds of voices, avoiding people until you find yourself at the end of a dingy dead-end corridor and you press your knuckles into your eyes and scream.

You sink down onto the ground next to a jumble of cleaning equipment and you’re sobbing so hard you want to throw up, and after a few minutes you actually do.

You’re considering cleaning up your mess with one of the mops that are right there at your disposal, but then Brad comes around the corner. He’s wearing a pale grey hoodie with the hood up, and he has a large bottle of water tucked under his arm.

“Fuck off!” you scream at him, your voice reverberating down the corridor.

But he doesn’t fuck off. He comes over to you and puts his hand out as though he wants to haul you up onto your feet. As though you’re friends.

You’re not friends.

“Come,” he says.

“Fuck you, I’m not going back in there.”

“Not there,” he says. “Somewhere else.”

You stand, ignoring the proffered hand.

“Where?” you ask.

“Outside,” he says. “Fresh air.”

He turns and you follow him, because you can’t stay at the end of this corridor next to a pile of your own sick, and you want some of that water. You don’t want to chance meeting anyone else in the ablutions or at a vending machine right now.

You follow Brad through a maze of ugly corridors – he seems to know his way around this venue – and eventually you reach a door with a push bar. He heaves it open and you find yourselves in a crummy sort of parking area full of trash skips and a few maintenance vehicles.

“Up there,” he points, indicating a grubby track worn into the grass on the steep verge behind the car park. It leads up to a ragged hole in a chain-link fence.

“What’s up there?” you ask.

“Fresher air,” he says. “Come.”

He scrambles up the verge with surprising agility and you struggle after him, sliding on sharp pebbles and scrubby sods of grass. When he reaches the fence, he holds out his hand for you and you take it this time, letting him pull you the rest of the way up. You’re surprised that he manages this, that you don’t both end up tumbling back down onto the tarmac, grazing the skin from your elbows.

He’s still skinner than you. In fact, he’s even skinner than he was before, while you’ve put on a bit of weight. From the drinking. From the days upon days of being immobilised by depression. You’re still small, but your face has filled out a little and you’ve softened around the middle.

You clamber after him through the hole in the fence and find yourself in a wide open field without another soul in sight. It’s getting dark now, the last of the light smudged in fading purples at the horizon, the first stars twinkling out above you.

Some trick of geography has blocked out all the sounds of the venue and the traffic around it. You can see the headlights of a distant car moving along a road at the far end of the field, but you can’t hear it. All you can hear is the sound of the breeze in the grass, your own breathing and the distant hum of an aeroplane passing high overhead, like a blinking, mobile star.

Brad is wading off into the grass and you follow him. You don’t know why you’re tagging along on this adventure. You hate him. You hate all of them.

“Can I have some water?” you ask, and he hands you the bottle and slumps down onto the ground, crossing his legs.

You pour some water into your mouth, careful not to let your puke-tainted lips touch the bottle. You swill, you spit. You splash your face. Rinse and repeat.

He watches you.

Once you’ve dealt with the taste of sick in your mouth, you down half the bottle and then hand it back to him.

“Better?” he says.

You sit down next to him on the grass and say, “No”, because fuck that. You’re not better.

“You want to talk about it?”

He sounds genuine. Like he really cares. You steal a sidelong glance at him and see that the look on his face matches the tone of his voice. He’s worried about you. He wants to help. It’s a pity he can’t.

You shake your head and lie back in the grass, wishing you’d brought a jacket. You’re still in the shirt you were wearing on stage. You were boiling up then, and afterwards too, but the temperature’s dropping fast as the moon rises bright and blind into the sky.

He stretches out next to you and you’re both silent, watching the stars, the grubby rags of cloud scudding in front of them, another plane passing overhead.

“Everything can be okay if you want it to be,” he says.

You remember your mother saying something like that to you once. You came home to her in pieces, and she didn’t recognise you.

She put you in a bed that might’ve been yours once, and you lay there tossing and sweating, pain ripping through you. It was so bad you were surprised that your skin wasn’t purple from blood welling up underneath it. You felt lacerated from within. You bit your pillow to stop yourself from screaming.

She held you, but you weren’t grateful. _Where were you?_ you thought. _Where the fuck were you?_ And you knew that that wasn’t entirely fair, but you couldn’t help thinking it.

You can’t help thinking.

You realise you’re crying in the field and you turn your face away from Brad, feeling the grass scratch your cheek. The cold is rising out of the turf, stiffening your muscles, chattering your teeth together, and you shiver, hugging your bare arms around yourself.

You’re going to get a divorce. There’s no denying it. All that time, all that work, all those memories. She’s going to make it hard for you and it’s going to be hard for Draven, but he’ll be better off than you were when your own parents split. You’ll make sure he’s safe.

The icy breeze has scoured the fuzz out of your head and you have achieved something like clarity. The knowledge aches like a blade twisting in your chest, but you know that if you don’t end this chapter of your life, it’s going to end you first. The darkness has been dragging you low.

The cold cuts across your skin. You’re freezing, but part of you is at peace with that. The pleasure and the pain. The pain and the pleasure.

It’s a better sort of pain than what you felt earlier; the pain of letting everyone down, including yourself. Especially yourself.

Brad is sitting up, moving around. You ignore him, tears still leaking out of you, growing cold on your cheeks.

But then he shifts closer and tucks his hoodie over you as though it’s a blanket. It almost is. Like all of his clothes, it’s massively oversized.

You turn your head towards him. He’s in a vest, his spindly arms wrapped around his knees.

He smiles at you — just the one corner of his mouth lifting up, his lips pressed together. The wind tugs at his dark curls and his eyes sparkle with starlight.

Everything can be okay if you want it to be.

Everything can be okay.

Everything.

*****


	3. Minutes to Midnight // Haunted

“Do you believe in ghosts?” asks Mike.

“No,” you say, but without conviction. You don’t know what you believe in.

You’re wrapping up album number three, at Rick Rubin’s Laurel Canyon mansion. It’s meant to be haunted.

This album has been different from the first two. New producer, new sound, new process. You’re involved in a way that you weren’t before. Your opinion carries new weight now that they all know you a bit better and trust you a bit more. Now that you’re clean.

Sort of clean. You’ve ditched the hard drugs, but you’re still working on the weed and the booze. The booze is the problem.

They staged an intervention, led by Brad. It smashed you into pieces, but then they helped you put yourself back together, and you felt somehow more whole afterwards, once you stopped feeling angry and betrayed. You’d been broken and rebuilt before, but that had been shoddy work, pieces misaligned, cracks showing. This time, it was better.

You met someone new – supportive, kind, beautiful – and you married her. You released an album with another band, where all the songs were yours and you didn’t have to compromise. You excised a crowd of demons.

You sat with Brad in one of the weird rooms in this weird house when you first got here, and you told him things. You told him what had happened and how you felt. You went all the way back, too, which he hadn’t been expecting. His face blanched, but he stayed put for session after session, listening closely, even when the horror of it made him physically cringe.

One time, when you broke down in the middle of a story, he put his hand on your shoulder and he squeezed it gently and he said “Chester, you’re here. You made it. You survived. I’m so proud of you.”

And that just made you cry harder. But at the end of it all, you felt pure. You were raw, but in a hopeful way. Ready to heal. Scoured clean.

You had all these people around you, lifting you up, pulling you forward and you were so grateful. You still are.

What none of them understand, though, is that there are days when you backslide; days when, for seemingly no reason whatsoever, you’re not okay anymore. The fact is, you don’t simply reach a point at which you’re fixed for good and that’s that. It doesn’t work that way. You need maintenance, but you’re scared to ask for it. You’re ashamed.

They’ve put in the work. You can’t ask them to put in more. Especially not Brad. He’s given more than anyone else.

But there are days when the past rears up like a leviathan from the deep and locks its jaws around you and you sink. You remember how it feels to go low, images of the worst times flash in your head, snapshots under exploding lightbulbs, and the fear steals your breath, crowds your head with ghosts.

“I know it’s just rumours and ghost stories,” says Mike, “but this house really does feel haunted.”

“I keep thinking I’m seeing things moving out of the corner of my eye,” says Joe. “But then when I look, there’s nothing.”

“Stop trying to freak me out,” says Rob.

“I wouldn’t stay here overnight if you paid me to,” says Mike.

“Same,” save Dave. “Have you heard the sounds the toilet makes when you flush it? It’s like there’s a beast living in the pipes.”

“Which toilet is that? There’s like… a hundred of them,” says Joe.

“The one… the one in that nook. Near that cranny,” says Dave.

“You guys are pathetic,” says Brad. “Scared of an old toilet.”

“Well if you’re such a badass, why don’t you stay here overnight with that toilet?” says Dave.

Brag shrugs. “Sure. Whatever.”

“Seriously?” says Mike.

“Yeah,” says Brad. “Why not? If it will make you all shut up about the fucking ghosts, I’ll sleep here tonight.”

“What about you, Chester?” says Dave. “You brave enough?”

You have been spacing out, staring at the giant flags draped across the ceiling, the play of the sunset light filtering into the studio space through a small window, partially obscured by Rob’s drum set.

“Sure, whatever,” you say, mimicking Brad without realising it right away.

You catch Brad’s eye and see something there for a moment, but before you can figure out what it is, Brad looks away.

You don’t look away from him, though. It’s hard to look away from Brad these days. He’s grown his hair out into a spectacular jewfro that naturally draws the eye whenever he’s in the room. It’s massive and fluffy. It looks really soft.

There was a time when you had lots of dark, curly hair too, but it wasn’t the same. It didn’t do the things that Brad’s hair does. Back then, you put your hair into dreads to control it, but you eventually cut them off, and you never grew them back again.

Mike leaves first, then Rob and Dave, and finally Joe, laughing and joking and trying to freak you out about the haunted house, theatrically bidding you farewell as though it’s the last time you’ll ever see each other, because the ghosts are going to get you in the night.

You’re not worried about the haunted house. It’s you who is haunted. It doesn’t matter what house you’re in.

Brad seems to have picked up on this. As soon as you’re alone, he asks if you’re okay and you tell him that you are, but he knows you too well now. You’ve let him so far into your head that you can’t lie to him anymore.

“I’m having flashbacks,” you tell him. “I don’t know why.”

You’re sitting on the red couch that you and Mike use when you’re discussing lyrics and melodies. Brad has crossed his legs underneath him. He looks like some sort of mystical wiseman, but he’s not. He doesn’t know how to fix you. He doesn’t have all the answers, even if he maybe wishes he does.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he says.

He doesn’t ask you what the flashbacks are about, and part of you is grateful for that, but another part of you is feeling nihilistic, self-destructive, ready to tear all of your wounds wide open again, to let them bleed everywhere.

He’s looking at you. He’s just looking at you. You remember that night in the bus six years ago. Is he remembering it too? You were on a couch, just like this. Well, it was a smaller couch. You were forced to sit right up next each other then. There are about two feet between you now.

He’s looking at you. What is he thinking? Maybe he’s wondering why you’re looking at him, and what you’re thinking.

“Brad, have I told you your hair is amazing?” you say.

“Oh,” he says. “Thanks.” He puts his fingers into it and fluffs it a bit, almost self-consciously.

You move closer. “Can I try?” you ask.

Why? Nihilism. Disregard for consequences. These are things that happen when you backslide.

Also… desire.

“Um,” he says. “Sure.”

You lift one hand and he tilts his head towards you and you sink your fingers into his hair. It’s just as soft as it looks. You move your fingers through the softness, then slowly curl your hand into a fist and tug lightly, and you see his lips open for a second as though he’s going to make a sound, but he doesn’t.

You withdraw your hand.

He’s looking at you again. He’s about to say something, but you’re both startled by a sudden loud thud from another room.

“What the fuck was that?” you say.

“Not a ghost,” he says, “there’s no such thing.” But his eyes are wide.

You venture together into the room you think the sound came from, but you can’t figure out what it was.

You microwave a couple of potatoes, eat them in the studio while watching old music videos on a laptop.

Later, you take a shower and the pipes creak and the shower-head rattles and splutters. You know he’s just outside the door, waiting his turn. When you emerge, smelling like tangerines, he smiles and says “Shower’s not haunted then?”

“Oh, it’s definitely haunted,” you say, and he laughs.

You wait for him outside the bathroom like he did for you. You’re not sure why you do that, but he seems grateful when he steps out wearing his flannel pyjamas, with his hair wrapped in a towel, a few stray wet curls escaping.

“That’s the most haunted shower I’ve ever been in,” he says.

You brush your teeth together side by side like young brothers who have been told to get ready for bed. Or like spouses. You make eye contact with him in the mirror several times. You pull a face and he elbows you playfully in the ribs and you laugh, toothpaste dribbling down your chin.

Without discussing it beforehand, you take turns to rinse your mouths so that there’s always one of you looking in the mirror and therefore no opportunity for any spectres to sneak up behind you and frighten you to death.

It’s late. You’ve got your things in separate rooms and you’re saying goodnight, ready to split up and get some sleep, when a horrifying groaning creaking sound followed by a shuddering crash makes Brad stumble against you, gripping your arms.

“It’s just the pipes,” you say, but your heart is thumping in your chest.

“Sorry,” he says, stepping away from you. “Fuck. Nearly had a heart attack. Can we hang out for a bit? I’m wide awake now.”

And so you make your way back to the room with the red couch.

You’re in there for all of three minutes before you hear that horrible sound again. You jump in fright and so does he, and the space between you vanishes. His eyes are wide and his hand is like a claw gripping your leg.

“What the hell,” he whispers.

“Hey,” you say. “You said it yourself. There’s no such thing as ghosts.”

“But what was that sound?”

“It’s an old house,” you say. “It’s creaky. It has weird acoustics.”

He doesn’t look convinced. His hand is still on your leg and realise that you don’t really want him to move it.

“I’ll protect you,” you say, grinning at him, and he gives you a small smile. His grip loosens on your leg and you think he might take his hand away, so you put your hand on top of his, keeping it there.

“Ches?” he says.

“Yes, Brad?” you say.

This could go one of two ways. You brace yourself for disappointment.

But you are not disappointed.

He lifts his free hand, touches it to your forehead and strokes it slowly along the top of your head, following the strip of hair you’ve left unshaved — the ‘2D mohawk’, as Joe calls it — running it all the way to the back of your head and letting it come to rest on your neck.

“Ches,” he says again. It’s not a question this time — it’s a statement; an acknowledgement of your existence; a proclamation of the fact that you are real and you are here, and he sees you.

In what way does he see you?

You think about that night in the studio bus when you breathed the smoke between his lips. You think of the dreams that followed. He mellowed after that. He was kinder to you. That was when he started to see you properly. You remember how he gave you his hoodie outside in the cold field. The way he helped you up off the grass, put the hoodie over your head even though his own skin was gooseflesh. The way he guided you back to the dressing room with his arm around your back and made you hot tea. The way he sat with you as your life unravelled and listened — truly listened — to everything you had to say.

You look into his eyes and you want to kiss him so badly that it aches, but you don’t know if that’s what this is about. You don’t know if that’s okay. You’re worried that you’ll ruin this connection by taking it further than it’s meant to go.

But you needn’t worry.

He reads it in your eyes and his hand still resting on the back of your neck gently pulls your face towards his, and you let it happen. You touch your foreheads together. Your nose bumps against his. You can feel his breath on your lips.

You slide both hands into his wild, curly hair, tangling your fingers into it slowly, rubbing its slightly wet, silky softness between your fingertips. Your lips find his with the softest of touches. It’s even less of a kiss than the smoking shotgun all those years ago, and yet it’s so much more.

His fingers curl and uncurl against your neck, gentle and soothing.

“Brad,” you mumble. “Are you still scared?”

“I’m terrified,” he says.

“Of ghosts?”

“No,” he says, and pulls your face closer, pressing your mouths together properly, his lips sliding smoothly against yours, your heart speeding up suddenly and then slowing down to a steady, comfortable pace as you kiss him back.

He kisses you as though he’s been casually imagining doing it for just as long as you have.

This is a liminal point in space and time. It’s strange, it’s haunted, and what happens here and now exists outside of the realities you occupy on normal days. This kiss is a satellite that will circle your world forever, but never be a part of it, and you both know that.

He tastes minty fresh. His lips are soft and cool as water. You inch your tongue out tentatively and find his waiting there for you, and they meet and glide together. Your hands are deep in the shower-damp tangles of his hair.

Somewhere in the depths of the house, the pipes crash and groan again and he jumps slightly, but instead of pulling away from you, he pulls you closer. You tilt back and forth, gently pushing and pulling as the kiss deepens, and you have the sense that he wants to be lying down, but he doesn’t know whether he should push you onto your back or pull you on top of him.

Who is dominant in a situation like this? You’re both small, but he’s thinner than you. You’re stronger and wilder than he is, but you’re also more vulnerable. He has been supporting you and guarding you for years, but he’s more frightened of the bumps in the night than you are, even though this whole stay-over was his idea. He’s inexperienced, but you’re damaged.

He wants you to do what you want, but you don’t know what you want, so when you do eventually sink down, you’re side by side, facing each other. You’re equals.

You hold his slight, angular body against your own, hip bones jutting into one another, knees knocking. You slip your hand underneath his flannel top and trace your fingers up the bony bumps of his spine.

Another crash, closer this time. Again, Brad twitches in fright and you hug him tighter.

“I’ll protect you from the evil plumbing,” you whisper and he laughs, his lips finding yours again.

This kiss is hotter, breathier, as though the supernatural threat is a real and present danger, and time is short. You’re the last people on earth, making the most of your final moments before the apocalypse swallows you up.

You slip your leg between his, pressing against him and he moans quietly into the kiss. It strikes you then how strange this is. After the shotgun almost-kiss in the back of the bus, you’ve circled each other for the better part of a decade, but you’ve always maintained a safe enough distance that your relationship never needed to be defined or discussed beyond the fact that you are bandmates and friends. There simply hasn’t been enough of anything else for it to be worth dissecting.

But what is this? You’ve spun out of orbit. You’ve crashed into one another as though it was always going to happen. As though you’d planned for it to be this way all along.

He breaks this kiss but keeps his face against yours.

“I feel like we’re being watched,” he whispers.

A shiver runs up your spine, but it’s not fear. You slide your hand down his narrow back onto his hip and pull him tighter against you. He gasps slightly and clamps his legs around your thigh.

“Then let’s give them something worth watching,” you say.

*****


	4. A Thousand Suns // Kind

The new album is an exciting and beautiful apocalyptic journey. It’s powerful and dark, but you want to end it on a hopeful note, with something different and unexpected. Something stripped down and simple to round off the complexity and layering of the songs that came before it.

Outside of the music, you’ve been having a rough time. Home life, health, happiness, in flux. You keep getting hurt and you’re feeling the pull of dark things and it’s bringing you low. You’re finding the lure of booze to be strong. You’re finding yourself indifferent to things that once brought you joy. You’re finding that, more and more often, you hate your own face when you see it in the mirror in the morning.

You’re keeping it together most of the time, playing your part, doing your duty, but Brad knows. Brad always knows.

You’re in the studio with him and he’s strumming an acoustic guitar, humming melodies that you grow and shape and begin to lay words on top of.

_“When life leaves us blind, love keeps us kind… It keeps us kind…”_

Brad stops strumming as you hold the note and let it fade into nothing. He tilts his head and gives you a small, crooked smile.

“That’s beautiful, Ches,” he says.

“You built the foundations,” you reply, dismissively. You get the feeling that he’s complimenting you because he knows you’ve been down, and he wants to lift your mood.

He shrugs and looks away. “Want to track a bit of it?”

You enter the vocal booth while he fiddles with knobs and arranges things on the monitor. He’s about as good as Mike is with all the technical stuff these days. You prefer not to get too involved in those things.

He gives you a thumbs-up and you close your eyes, put your hands against your headphones, allow yourself to sink into the chaotic, churning well of untapped emotions inside you. You let them flow through you, powerful and raw. You sing your heart out, converting your pain into words and melodies. Your voice is crystal and light, sparkling and shattering at just the right moments. It’s alive. You perform an entire verse of lyrics you’ve never sung before and when you’re done and you open your eyes, you see that Brad has swivelled his chair so that he’s facing away from you. He’s curled over. He seems to have his face in his hands.

“Brad?”

You hang up the headphones and leave the booth. As you approach him, he swivels the chair again, trying to keep his back to you, but you take hold of the chair and turn it so that he’s facing you, and you can see the tears on his cheeks.

“Brad?” you say. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he says. “Just… so beautiful, I can’t handle it.”

“The lyrics?”

“Yes,” he says. “And your voice. And you.”

You haven’t kissed him in over two years. You haven’t lain with him. You haven’t tugged on his hair and had him moan against your lips. You haven’t pressed your body against his, entangled your legs and grappled and rolled and crashed onto the floor, faces crushed together, hips pushing until you cum, loudly and joyfully, one after the other, without even removing any clothes.

It happened once and you never mentioned it afterwards. That was the first and last night you spent at Laurel House. No-one else ever knew what you did there, except, perhaps, the ghosts.

You still hug him on stage, just like you hug the rest of them. You sling your arm over his shoulder. You tease him. Everything is normal. But there are quiet moments, sometimes, when your eyes will catch his across a table and you’ll know that he’s remembering, and that he knows you’re remembering too.

There was one time, about a year ago, when he was cut up about the death of a relative — a great aunt he had been very fond of — and you caught him crying in a hotel bathroom and you stepped inside and closed the door and stood behind him, looking at him in the mirror. You wrapped your arms around his stomach and rested your head against the back of his shoulder and held him until the tears stopped. That was the only moment since Laurel House in which you crossed any lines that you haven’t crossed with the others. That was all.

But now, he’s crying again, and it’s different. He’s crying because the song’s beautiful but he’s also crying because he wants something he can’t have, and you know this is true because it’s something you’re familiar with, something that you’ve boxed away safely in your own head. The look on his face is opening that box, and the feelings are breaking loose. They’re inconvenient. They’re dangerous.

They’re also undeniable.

You watch him as he cries. You study his pale, handsome face. His dark beard is close-cropped and tidy. The massive fro is gone for now, but he’s keeping his hair long enough to be glossy and curly. Long enough for you to run your fingers through it. And so you do.

He looks up at you.

“Sorry, Chester,” he says. “I didn’t mean to—”

You curl your fingers and tug on his hair, remembering how he liked that before. It’s like a switch that turns his voice off and puts him into a state of suspended animation, lips parted, eyes wide. You unfurl your fingers slowly, running them along his scalp, and then close your hand into a fist again, tugging slightly harder this time. He lets out a broken breath.

“What do you want, Brad?” you say.

“I want you to be as happy as you deserve to be,” he says.

“What makes you think I deserve to be happy?”

“What makes you think you don’t?”

His eyes are still leaking and he wipes them with a shaky finger and sniffs.

“This song…” he begins, but his voice trails off. He doesn’t know how to express what he wants to say in words.

Without warning, he stands, backs you up against the mixing console and kisses you.

You put your hands on his belt, which is holding up his pair of knee-length shorts. The shorts are skinny-cut but would still be falling down around his ass without the belt there. While the other members of the band grow and shrink as the years go by, Brad remains consistently thin. Very thin. Perhaps too thin, but you don’t mind.

You undo the belt and, as you predicted, the shorts slip down and when you rest your hands on his hips now, they’re touching the frayed hem of his underwear.

You slide your back along the console, your hands still on his hips, moving you both sideways until there’s a flat surface behind you. You hoist yourself up onto it and wrap your legs around him and bury your face in his hair.

“Chester,” he mumbles against you. “What are we doing?”

“I don’t know,” you say. “But we seem to have a system, don’t we? One moment for each album…”

He is silent for a while, and then he says, “You’re right. I never realised.”

This realisation emboldens him, as though having your connection as part of an ongoing tradition justifies it in every way. He stops asking questions. He wraps his arms tightly around you and, with all his strength, he hauls you off the the desk and onto the floor. You tug his T-shirt over his head and he attacks your clothes, frantically undoing buttons and yanking zippers and tugging the layers from you as though he’s trying to put out a fire.

And then you’re naked with him in the muted glow of the fairy lights and the computer monitor. It’s silent but for the faint hum of machines and the sound of your breathing. He’s on top of you, and then you’re on top of him, stroking his hair, twisting it around you fingers, pulling it until he’s whimpering.

“Jesus, this is really a thing for you, isn’t it?” you say, pulling harder. “This is your kink.”

“I… fuck… I guess…” he gasps as you continue tugging his hair, making it fluffier and fluffier as you separate the curls. “I’d… I’d return the favour but…”

You’ve been keeping your head shaved. There’s nothing for him to grab onto.

“I remember what it’s like,” you say. “It was never really my thing.”

“What is your thing?” he breathes.

You pull his hair again, almost roughly this time, and he gasps and arches his back, his chest touching yours. You kiss his lips and his tear-stained cheek and then nip at his earlobe with your teeth. You say, quietly, right into his ear, “My thing is sweet, hot consensual sex between open-minded adults who care for and respect one another.”

“Okay,” he breathes, his head rolling against your teasing, tangled fingers, sending visible shivers down his body. “Okay, let’s do that then.”

 

***

 

The roar of the crowd subsides into an excited hum.

The lights go out and you’re plunged into darkness for a moment before a spotlight captures you in its beam and then another one captures Brad.

You’re in a wide-open space and there are thousands and thousands of people in front of you, watching you, and the rest of your bandmates are somewhere behind you on the stage, but even though you know this, and you can hear them, it still feels like you and Brad are the only people who really exist.

He’s sitting on a stool, his guitar resting on his leg. He strums the first few melancholy chords and the crowd erupts, but they’re just a sound. They’re abstract.

Brad is real.

He’s looking at you as you look at him as he plays the guitar, and he smiles and gives an almost imperceptible nod.

You wrap your hands around the microphone and you sing, your eyes sliding closed and the song enveloping you.

_“When you feel you’re alone… Cut off from this cruel world… Your instincts telling you to run…”_

You get the crowd to sing a chorus with you, but the end of the song is yours — yours and Brad’s — and you look back at him, your eyes meeting his as they glint under his beam of golden light. He’s still smiling. You hold his gaze.

_“Remember you’re loved… And you always will be… This melody will bring you right back home…_

_When life leaves us blind…._

_Love keeps us kind…”_

*****


	5. Living Things // Honest

You give and you take.

You offer him a bit of vocal training and in return he helps you with the guitar. You learned to play on a right-handed guitar even though you’re left handed, because that’s all you had available at the time, and so you’ve always struggled with the instrument, but he’s patient and good humoured about it and you spend a lot of time laughing and making up stupid songs together backstage.

You teach him some things you learned at the gym; stretches and exercises to keep him limber and prevent him from hurting himself during the shows. You’re in your mid-thirties now; you have to look after yourselves. He’s impressed by your strength. He tries to teach you how to juggle, but you’re hopeless at it and it becomes a joke for LPTV.

You tell him that you’re in awe of his coordination, his quiet gracefulness, and he tells you that he finds your clumsiness endearing.

You talk him through the basics of mindfulness meditation as he sits crosslegged opposite you at the hotel after a show, listening intently. The others have gone to see a movie that you and Brad already watched on the plane. You don’t care that it would be worth seeing it again on a big screen with powerful sound and salty popcorn. You want to spend time with Brad, and he wants to spend time with you.

And so you meditate. You show him how to breathe, how to rest his consciousness on the rhythm of his breath. You tell him how you’ve been using the technique to find a place of peace and quiet. To block out the chaos. He proposes an alternative.

He fetches the sparkly headphones that we wears on stage. “Try this,” he says, and puts them carefully onto your head.

It’s like being plunged underwater. The silence is almost deafening. You can hear the rushing of your own blood.

He laughs at the look on your face. You can’t hear his laugh, but his face lights up with it.

_“Can — you — lip — read?”_ he mouths carefully.

“A little bit?” you say, or shout, out loud. He laughs again.

_“So you can understand what I’m saying right now?”_

“I think so.”

_“You look adorable in those headphones.”_

“Thank you, Brad.”

_“You don’t need to shout.”_

“SORRY,” you shout.

He laughs, throwing his head back and clapping his hands together. The laugh becomes a warm smile that doesn’t leave his face.

“What are you thinking?” you try not to shout.

He doesn’t mouth his response carefully enough, and you can’t lipread it.

“What?” you say.

He’s looking into your eyes, still smiling, but it’s a smaller smile now. A tentative smile. A secret smile.

He puts his hand in front of his mouth and says something behind it.

“What are you saying?” you ask him.

He moves his hand away from his mouth and starts to speak, but quickly, and you can’t read his lips fast enough, so you pull the headphones away from your ears just in time to catch the tail end of his monologue.

“…to know what it would be like to say it out loud.”

“Say what out loud?” you ask.

Brad shakes his head. “Tell me more about mindfulness.”

“What did you say to me, Brad?” you insist. There’s a note of distress in your voice that you really hadn’t intended, and Brad’s smile vanishes.

“Oh, Ches, I’m sorry, it was nothing— I’m just playing around.”

“What did you say, Brad?”

“Shit.” Brad rubs his head. “I didn’t think you were going to take this so seriously.”

“What did you say, Brad?”

“Chester, it doesn’t matter—”

You put the headphones down on the carpet and shift yourself closer to him. You can see the blush spreading over his cheeks, the discomfort permeating every aspect of his body language as he cringes away from you.

“Brad,” you say, your breath tickling his cheek. “What did you say behind your hand?”

He lifts his eyes and looks at you. He’s uncomfortable, but attempting to be brave.

“I love you,” he says, in a small, embarrassed voice. “That’s what I said behind my hand. ‘I. Love. You.’ — just like that.”

“And is it true?” you ask him.

“Yes,” he says. “You know that already.”

“Then why did you have to say it behind your hand while I had noise-cancelling headphones on?”

He says nothing, looks down into his lap and fiddles with a thread on his cut-off trousers.

“Brad,” you say.

He ignores you.

“Brad,” you say again. You take his bearded chin in your hand and tilt his face upwards so that he’s forced to look at you. “Answer me.”

“Because it’s a fucking cliche, isn’t it?” he blurts out. “I didn’t want to make you cringe. I just wanted to say it. This is so stupid.”

His looks all hot and bothered and you only just manage to stop yourself from laughing. He’s feeling so self-conscious, so embarrassed, so painfully awkward.

“Brad,” you say, but before he can respond, you press your lips against his lips and he goes very still.

You pull away and sit back, crossing your legs neatly and examining his face as he tries to sort through what is clearly a very complex onslaught of emotions.

“So I guess this is our Living Things moment,” he says after a while.

“I suppose so,” you respond. “Has it really been that long?”

You think back to that night in the studio, with the fairy lights. The fairy lights! The beautiful fucking fairy lights. You remember them clearly. They filled your vision like a galaxy of bright planets and moons and stars. And suns. A thousand suns. Your eyes were unfocussed, your head thrown back, and as the white-hot pleasure fizzed across your nerve endings, you were lost in their glow.

Brad is also remembering that night. You can see it in his eyes.

You pick up the sparkly headphones and ease them over his head, clamping them securely over his ears.

“Brad,” you say.

He watches you closely, and nods.

“We are living things,” you say.

“We are living things,” he mumbles.

You run the tip of your finger down the centre of his forehead, along the bridge of his nose, onto his lips, as though you’re anointing him in some sort of pagan ritual.

“We are living things, and we think and we feel and that’s okay.”

You’re not sure if he has lip-read you accurately. He blinks, bemused, distracted by the fingertip resting on his bottom lip.

You shift closer. His dark eyes scan hungrily over your face and linger on your mouth, waiting for you to speak again.

You breathe in. You breathe out.

“I love you too,” you say…

…and in the hour that follows, he leaves you in no doubt whatsoever that he understood.

*****


	6. The Hunting Party // Perfect

You break your ankle.

If anyone were to ask one of your bandmates what happened, that’s what they’d say — “Chester broke his ankle” — but the truth is, you’ve broken more than just your ankle. You’ve broken your spirit and you’ve broken your life.

You don’t know why. You can’t explain it in a way that everyone could understand. It’s not a rational thing. You know this is temporary: the pain, the loss of freedom, the disappointment, the frustration, the isolation, all of it. It’s temporary. But the accident has taken the wind out of your sails, pulled the rug out from under your feet.

You’re sick and tired of it all. You feel defeated. You cannot be fucking bothered to deal with another injury, let alone one that’s this bad.

It’s forced you to cancel part of a tour, unleashing a torrent of abuse from entitled fans. It’s forced you to spend too much time bored stiff on your back, alone in your head, thinking about things you don’t want to think about.

When you wake up in the morning and you remember that you can’t walk and you feel the metal bits aching in your leg, and the weakness of your body from being unable to move, unable to exercise, unable to do anything you want to do, your mind immediately begins to stray towards tantalising thoughts of escape. Alcohol. Drugs. Oblivion.

Fuck everything. Fuck it all. You’re so fucking tired.

And one day, when the family is out at an event you can’t attend and you find yourself alone in your house, it’s so bad that you become scared of yourself, scared of your mind, scared of what you might do.

And so you text him.

_brad … can you come over? i’m falling apart. i’m sorry._

Suitably dramatic. You feel guilt, but your fear overrides it. You need him. And he comes. He lets himself in with the spare key you gave him for emergencies. You hear the front door click behind him, the soft padding of his feet on the stairs, the creak of the floorboards as he enters the bedroom.

“Oh, Chester…” he says, and the tone of his voice tells you how bad you must look. You’re in a sorry state.

He sits on the bed beside you and gathers you into his arms, and then the tears come, and you feel as though they’ll never stop. You shudder and heave and choke as you cry, and he cradles your head against him.

“It fucking hurts, Brad. I’m so tired. I just don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t have the energy.”

That’s not even it, though. You don’t have the words to explain how empty you feel. How meaningless everything has become. The inertia. The indifference. The nausea at having this stupid body and living this stupid life.

“Ches,” he whispers, nuzzling your head, kissing your temple, stroking you softly behind your ear with his thumb. “It’s going to be okay. You’ll get through this.”

“How?” you say. “How am I going to get through anything? I’m fucking useless. I don’t want to try anymore. I can’t. I just want to go to sleep and never wake up.”

“No, Chester…” he murmurs. “It’ll pass. You’ll get better.”

You know you sound like a child, but you can’t help it. You don’t care. “It hurts,” you sob.

“Your ankle?” he asks.

“Everything,” you say. “Everything hurts.”

He kicks off his shoes, lifts the duvet cover and slides underneath it. He holds you, and you feel small and fragile. You’ve shrunk from your lack of exercise. You’re thinner than you’ve been in years. He’s stronger than you are right now. You can feel it in the power of the hug he’s giving you, pressing you tightly against himself, squashing your face into his shoulder.

You inhale the smell of him, herbal and clean. He’s warm. You close your eyes and rub your face into him as though you’re trying to burrow your way under his skin.

“Brad,” you mumble. “I don’t want to be crippled for our Hunting Party moment.”

“What?” he says, confused.

“Our Hunting Party moment. This isn’t it. It doesn’t count. Okay?”

He laughs. “Okay. Fair enough. You can’t do any hunting with a broken ankle.”

You shift against him, careful not to move your aching leg too much. You pull away so that you can look into his eyes. He’s smiling at you, but it’s a sad smile. He’s worried. He cares too much. You want to see a different sort of smile on his face, so you kiss him.

“That didn’t count,” you say as you pull away.

The smile on his face is better now. There’s less pity in it. He moves forward and takes your lips with his again, and there’s tongue this time and you can feel that he’s smiling more and more as the kiss intensifies, growing hotter and wetter and needier.

Eventually, he pulls away with a gasp. “That also didn’t count,” he says, and runs his hand slowly down your chest, onto your stomach, sliding it underneath your shirt, probing a delicate fingertip into your bellybutton.

“Does this count?” he says, feigning innocence, tickling his fingers against your skin.

“No,” you say, and latch your lips hungrily onto his neck. The pain is going away. It’s draining out of you like dirty water out of a bathtub. You’ve almost forgotten about your shattered ankle. The hollow, dead space in your chest is filling up with something warm and sweet, like spiced cider. You’re already starting to feel drunk on it.

You shiver even though you’re not at all cold. You take his wandering hand in your own and guide it down between your legs. He makes a little sound, something in between a chuckle and gasp. He’s amused. He’s aroused.

He gazes at you with those dark, infinite eyes. They’re creased at the corners as he smiles at you. Warm eyes. Kind eyes.

“I can take the pain away for a while,” he says, stroking you.

You nod and blush and say “Please… please do…”

…And after he’s given you the most mind-blowing and yet exquisitely gentle blowjob of your life, he says “That didn’t count either.”

 

***

 

You make it through. The months go by and eventually you’re on your feet again, and although the ankle still aches and you can feel the metal pieces holding it together, especially in the cold, you’re feeling okay. You resume the tour.

Things are still messy and the bad days are still too close together, but there are enough days where you feel like you can do this. You feel like it’s worth being in the world.

And neither you nor Brad have forgotten that you haven’t yet had your moment for this album. You’d officially decided that his visit during your convalescence was void. You’ve both taken this decision very seriously, as though you’d signed a contract about it. That day didn’t count, but tradition needs to be upheld.

You keep catching his eye whenever there’s a possibility of a moment alone on the road. He looks at you or you look at him as if to say “How about now?”, but something keeps on getting in the way or compromising the potential of the situation. For some reason, you both want it to be perfect this time.

Every other connection you’ve had with him has been unplanned, spontaneous, whether it was a moment of tender affection on an open field under the stars or a breathless fuck in the recording studio. The fact is, you’ve never sought perfection, but you’ve always found it anyway.

You’re running out of tour days. Soon enough, you’ll be heading back into the studio for the next album. You’re starting to panic, and so is he.

One the last night of the tour, after the final show, you’re in a ridiculously expensive restaurant with the band, celebrating, and it’s late and everyone’s drunk except for you and Brad. You can’t drink and Brad chooses not to in solidarity. You’re in the restaurant’s fancy, citrus-scented restroom, taking a leak in an impossibly clean urinal, when Brad comes up behind you and kisses you on the back of the neck.

“Wha—” you say. “No! Not in the toilets, Brad. It needs to be a perfect moment.” You pull up your boxers and zip up your jeans.

“But it’s the last day!” he says. “And these are the nicest toilets I’ve ever seen. These toilets are nicer than my house.”

“But what if someone else comes in?” you say, and you know right away that this is your last sensible statement of the night. Your ability to think rationally is rapidly eroding as Brad plants tiny kisses on your neck and jaw.

“They’re drunk. Who cares,” he says. “And we can go in there.” He points at the largest of the three cubicles.

It’s such a fancy restroom, that the cubicle has its own pile of freshly laundered hand towels on a little shelf, and its own sink, with a candle burning in a little glass holder next to the artisanal organic soap dispenser. Still, you hesitate.

“Ches…” He says, rubbing his nose against the back of your head. He has become so bold in his attraction to you. It’s making you hot under the collar, and elsewhere.

“Fuck it,” you say. “Hunting Party moment. Let’s go.”

As soon as you’re in the cubicle and the door is safely latched behind you, he pounces on you.

At some point during this reckless encounter, you hear Mike and Joe enter the restroom, laughing, wasted, and Mike says “Where the fuck are Chester and Brad?”

You have your hand over Brad’s mouth and he’s laughing silently, tears prickling at the corners of his eyes.

Joe rattles the door of your cubicle, and you hear him mumble “Out of order”.

“Maybe they’re outside?” says Mike.

You both hold your breath as they piss and wash their hands. It seems to take forever, and you’re aching with need. The door has barely swung closed behind them before the hunt continues.

And afterwards, you’re sitting down to take an awkward leak while Brad sits on the peach-coloured tiled floor of this restaurant toilet, watching you, and you grin at him.

“Even though we had our moment in a restroom, it was still perfect,” you say.

“Of course it was,” he replies. “It always is.”

“This is ridiculous,” you say, your voice full of laughter. “They’ve probably gone home without us.”

“That’s fine. This cubicle is my home now,” says Brad. “Got everything I need right here.”

And you wish it was true.

*****


	7. One More Light // Eternal

**// CHESTER**

 

You’re not okay. You’re not even pretending to be okay.

You’re sliding down.

The day before the release of your seventh studio album, a tragedy brings you low – lower than you’ve been in as long as you can remember – and you begin to slide faster. A friend is dead by his own hand and you’re plummeting down into darkness.

You perform a new song in his honour, live on Jimmy Kimmel, and you barely keep it together. It’s a sad song, and it guts you with its fresh relevance. You stumble on the words, your voice cracks, and near the end of it, you miss one of the lines because your voice has vanished altogether. Brad glances up at you from his guitar, his face pinched with concern.

Backstage, he holds you in front of everyone, but you’re inconsolable. Someone wants to speak to you about some trivial thing or other and they hang around, waiting for Brad to stop hugging you, but he doesn’t. The hug goes on for so long that everyone else gets a bit awkward about it and eventually they leave the two of you alone.

“Hey,” says Brad. “Ches… talk to me. What can I do? How can I make it better?”

You just shake your head. You don’t have any words. There’s no point in words, and Brad realises this and stops using them. He sits with you, an arm around your back, holding your hand, letting you rest your head on his shoulder.

This is your One More Light moment, and you’re deeply grateful for it.

It’s you and Brad who attend the funeral together a few days later. You sing Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’, and Brad plays the guitar. He says he hopes you’ll feel better afterwards, once you’ve paid your respects, once you’ve got some closure — but you don’t feel better. You feel as though a cocoon is forming around you and everything is becoming hazy. You’re going numb.

You surface, sometimes. You do interviews and activities with the band and with your family, and you experience normality as though it’s the default, but it’s not. Love and happiness are in perfect abundance within those moments, but they ebb away quicker and quicker when you’re left alone in the bad neighbourhood of your mind.

It’s growing darker in there, and cold.

You think the world is beautiful, but it’s not for you. You think the world is hideous, and it’s not for anyone.

A terrorist attack at a venue in England forces you to cancel an upcoming show there. You can’t stop thinking about it, imagining that it had been one of _your_ shows — imagining familiar fans pierced by shrapnel, bleeding out in the foyer.

You don’t want to feel, but you feel. You want to feel, but you don’t feel.

You’re brought low.

You’re tired. You’re just tired.

You’re so, so tired.

You play a show on July 6th.

It’s your last one.

 

*****

 

**// BRAD**

 

Everyone’s in black, exchanging platitudes, numb.

You mill around as though in a dream. Some people try to talk to you. You mumble and look away. None of them matter. You don’t care about a single one of these people right now. The only person you want to speak to is _him_ , and he’s not here. You’ll never speak to him again.

At least not face to face. His body is gone. The energy and the beauty of it. His smile. His eyes. The softness of his hands. Gone. Ash. Dust.

You stumble away from the crowd into a shady stand of trees and hide behind one of them in its cool, wide shadow. You put your hand against the rough bark, allowing the tree to support your weight as you tremble and heave and try to catch your breath. But you can’t. You can’t breathe properly. Every time you inhale, it’s like you’re drawing shards of glass into your lungs, and every time you exhale, you choke.

The tears are pouring out of your eyes now. There’s no point in wiping them away. They run down your face and drip onto the grass at your feet.

It’s not a Jewish funeral. He wasn’t Jewish. But you start to recite the _El Maleh Rachamim_ , even though you’re not sure if you can remember all the words, or if it’s even the right one to be saying. You’re not sure about anything.

It’s not helping. You want to scream. You want to put your hands inside your chest and rip the pain out, even if it kills you. You sink down onto your knees and rest your head against the tree trunk.

The air has been very still, almost oppressive, all day, but just then, a cool breeze blows over you and you inhale it. The air is fresh and clean, and it’s the first proper breath you’ve managed in a while.

You sit down on the grass with your back up against the tree, you close your eyes and you breathe slowly and deeply. In through the nose, out through the mouth — the mindful way; the way Chester taught you that night in the hotel room.

You rest your mind on the rhythm of your breath. You focus on how it feels. In through the nose, out through the mouth, over and over, until your heart slows and your shoulders drop and your jaw unclenches and your mind stops screaming.

 

***

 

You cover the mirrors. You light a yahrzeit candle. You find a folded piece of notepaper in the inside-pocket of one of your jackets.

_hey, you found it! I just wanted to say — thank you for existing. love, always_

There’s a smiley face scribbled underneath the message. It’s undated and unsigned.

 

***

 

“Brad,” says Mike. “How are you?”

“I’m alive,” you say.

Mike nods as though he understands. But he doesn’t. Does he?

“You loved him,” says Mike. “You really loved him.”

You don’t say anything. You don’t need to. You run your fingers along your guitar strings and stare out of the window, watching the leaves stir in the trees, the sunlight flickering between them, a flock of birds tumbling across the sky. It’s beautiful.

“I’m glad he had you,” says Mike. “All those years. I’m glad you were there for him.”

His voice is very small, almost nervous, as though he’s worried that a single misplaced word will shatter you into a million tiny pieces.

But it won’t, and look up at him and smile, so that he knows it.

You’re alive and you’re going to be okay. And you’re going to carry on. And you’re going to be the best person you can be. You’re going to do it for _him_ , and even though he’s gone, he’ll be there with you every step of the way, in your heart and in your soul and in your memories and on your goddamn Spotify playlist, screaming into your ears.

He’s eternal.

 

***** FIN


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